This is Daniel Woodrell's seventh novel and his fourth set in the Ozark Mountains, one of those American regions 'that the world at large has decided to pass by', to quote John Williams from his forthcoming book, Back to the Badlands. 'Inasmuch as the Ozarks have any public profile or place in the national myth, it's as a Deliverance-style backwoods place, full of illiterate rednecks fishing and drinking moonshine and intermarrying,' Williams writes. Woodrell's work is little known on this side of the Atlantic, except maybe for his second novel, Woe to Live On, which was filmed by Ang Lee as Ride With the Devil. While it is fair to call his career somewhat patchy, his recent books have evinced a care and a commitment and a skill that he continues to nurture and hone so that his most recent book tends to be his best. This trend continues with Winter's Bone, a characteristically short novel of tremendous and, at times, ferocious power. Words such as 'bleak' and 'beautiful' and 'heartbreaking' spring to mind.

The main character is Ree, a 16-year-old female member of the terrifying Dolly clan, to which we were first introduced in the late-Nineties novel Give Us a Kiss. She has 'abrupt green eyes' and 'a body made for loping after needs'. She longs to join the army, the usual gimcrack route for those born lacking luck or money to get out of a place where, at 12, people are 'dead to wonder ... dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean', even though those before who have taken that route have ended up like Uncle Jack, 'who'd lived through Khe Sanh [the Vietnam war battleground] and four marriages, then died at a roller-skating rink from something he'd snorted'.

Ree shares a house with her two younger brothers and her mind-fried mother; her father, Jessup, a locally renowned 'crank chef', has jumped bail, after putting the house up for a bond. Unless Ree can track him down and persuade him to attend his hearing, the house will be taken. If he's dead, which she begins to suspect he is, then she'll have to prove that. So she sets off on a search, sometimes accompanied by her Uncle Teardrop (four blue tears inked under the eye on the melted side of his face) or her not-quite-Platonic-friend Gail, across the ice-blasted Ozarks, a place of ruins and valleys with ramshackle villages clinging to hillsides and populated by extended clans of killers and drunks and those modern moonshiners, the meth makers, chemists of amphetamines, who live under their own odd but rigid laws and have witnessed a certain biblical fundamentalism mutate into another kind of merciless orthodoxy. Here live brutal women who have about them 'a domineering reek of udder balm and brown gravy, straw and wet feathers', and the clan patriarch, Thump Milton, 'a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched'. Everything about Ree's quest is utterly compelling; everything evoked about the landscape and its people convinces completely.

Woodrell's language fascinates and intrigues; he manages to make this sort of American-English seem aeons old, ancient, a trait he shares not with Cormac McCarthy (whose idiom has in it the echo of the King James Bible smacking into Plymouth Rock) but with Thomas McGuane [see review, right]. It's not just the use of the demotic ('coggly', 'wamble'), although that helps; it's more the sense that both writers give of a language evolved over millennia into a kind of loose but recognisable facility with meaning and of reference; an impression that the tongue is so old and developed that it can be used to lasso the whip-quick change of conceptual signifier evident in a place where people use sat-nav to guide them to the wells and rivers from where they'll draw their water. This is apt, of course (not to mention fantastic, given that this kind of American-English hasn't existed for more than a few centuries), but it's not as if Woodrell has chosen a form to follow function; it's more that he can't write any other way, so absorbed is he by this rich and ringing vernacular. He conveys the clipped and functional utterances of the characters as strongly as the bleak beauty of the Ozarks themselves and the moving elemental force of Ree across them. There are occasional lapses into cutesiness - a baby's eyes opening 'slow as a school day', for example - but this is a natural and allowable side-effect of a vital loquacity: 'Inside the hood, Ree came to know the flavours of her own wind. The sound of her own bellows at work. The whistling breaths and smells that were her. She was loudly alive in her own ears and OK to smell.'

Winter's Bone pulses between innocence's triumph and annihilation; it recognises that there is 'a great foulness afoot in the world' but that we still walk among miracles and, despite the unexpectedly upbeat ending, reading it will make you feel that you walk on very, very thin ice, and know that chaos is very, very close. Such knowledge has many consequences; one of them is exhilaration.